Deal with the Devil (Withrow Chronicles Book 3)

by Michael G. Williams

  Deal with the Devil

  The Withrow Chronicles Book 3

  Michael G. Williams

  Contents

  Dedication

  A Bit of Background

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Other Works by Michael G. Williams:

  Falstaff Books

  Dedication

  To Kelly Jo for her dedication to living a life of meaning and experience.

  To Josh for his endless generosity in kindness, companionship, creativity and joy.

  To Kat for her ceaseless enthusiasm to make, to do and to try the new and interesting.

  To Brian for his immeasurable endurance, friendship and many hugs.

  To Mike for his humor, intelligence and constant encouragement.

  To Corwin for his boundless creativity and humor as a storyteller.

  To all my other sisters and brothers in St. Anthony Hall and my brothers in Mu Beta Psi for their devotion to art, letters and expression.

  A Bit of Background

  If you haven’t read Perishables or Tooth & Nail, the first and second books of The Withrow Chronicles, it might help to know that Withrow Surrett is a vampire lord who lives in suburbia. He would probably object to that description but it’s accurate, like it or not. Withrow has asserted personal authority over the vampires of North Carolina but spends his nights trying to go unnoticed by the state’s many mortals. In Perishables he battles the zombie apocalypse twice: once at a meeting of his neighborhood association and again six years later at a discount store. In the latter instance he allies himself with an exceptionally resourceful employee named Jennifer McCordy who is a fellow veteran zombie combatant. Tooth & Nail features Withrow fighting a bunch of redneck vampires in the area where he grew up: Asheville, North Carolina. With the assistance of Roderick, his psychopathic cousin and fellow vampire, Withrow learns that there was a vampire conflict of some sort in the past though he doesn’t know when or why. Withrow also develops his Last Gasp, an ability each vampire manifests (sometimes uniquely) once there is no one left in the mortal population who knew that vampire when they were alive. In Withrow’s case, it’s referred to as hindsight: the power to pick out one topic from a victim’s life and learn everything there is to know about that topic. Unfortunately, it requires the victim’s death.

  Better yet, why not read Perishables and Tooth & Nail yourself?

  1

  Ann Fletcher was out on patrol in the 800 block of Dupree Street when she opened and closed her first case as a vigilante hero.

  It was approximately ten o'clock on an October night just beginning to get crisp around the edges. Ann still had another mile and a half of streets to hike before she finished her usual route. That was a lot of ground to cover in a suburban setting: lots of short segments of heavy shadows, lots of cross streets where people paid only glancing attention to stop signs, lots of uneven ground. It seemed especially far in the dispirited, better-days-seen sort of suburbia she’d adopted as her turf. There were few unbroken sidewalks and plenty of uncertainty about the future glancing out of a too-certain past as she trod them. Ann told herself it didn’t bother her, though. She told herself she was used to it or that it couldn’t be as bad as a hundred other situations she’d seen before. That word landed with a clank and a thud insider her own head: before.

  Ann’s shrink called these “meditation walks” and had prescribed them to her when she refused psychoactive medication to treat what he called depression and she called being bored as all hell. She had to play a certain amount of patty-cake, though, to keep her appointments going at the VA hospital. So, she manned up and went out for walks every other night after she finished her shift at Durham Tech. Ann got herself psyched for them by joining her Neighborhood Watch and treating them as a short shift of guard duty more than as exercise or meditation. It wasn't like she could just not do it and then lie to her doctor. Lying wasted everybody's time and she had come to see time as the most precious thing she had left.

  Ann walked by herself as always. She kept her hair cropped very close still and tucked it out of sight under a ball cap. She was wearing dark blue jeans and lace-up boots and a black fleece. The cap kept her dark-skinned face and her narrowed, attentive eyes shielded from the glare of what few streetlights worked in these neighborhoods. She could see plenty, though. For instance, she noticed the door of 812 Dupree was ajar. It was a little old bungalow from the 1930’s or 1940’s, maintained but worn, recently painted a pink that couldn’t conceal its slightly sagging roofline. The lights were off inside but the flickering sodium bulb at the corner revealed all she needed to know: there was a problem in that house and she was very likely the only person in the world who had noticed.

  Ann showed neither hesitated nor even considered calling 911. With the care and caution of her years of training she slipped over the rail on the end of the front porch, under and past a dark front window and right up to the front door. She strained to listen and heard the clinking of metal on something else – a different metal or a very hard wood or something. There were clanks and scrapes and something jingling. Ann knew all too well what looting sounded like. She figured it was probably a burglar. She knew the people at this house had been out of town. The box at the end of the drive leaned a little to one side when the mail built up; a dog that had barked at her every night had been absent the last three; the flickering blue glow of a TV hadn't come from inside. Ann had noted all of these on her mental map of life in the shabbier parts of Durham, south of the freeway. This particular burglar presented no risk of harm to a family that wasn’t home but Ann couldn't stand the thought of someone just stealing out of convenience. She felt there was a scale by which iterations of a given criminal act could be judged worse the more petty, random and unfocused they became. A personal vendetta was something Ann could understand and appreciate; bad luck roulette and pure opportunism were not.

  She snuck the door more widely open, slipped past it and set it back as precisely where it had been as she could manage. She started silent roll steps forward up the stairs that led to the small second story. There was probably a bedroom in the back, standard with this type of floor plan, and the wobbly streak of a flashlight being bounced around from up there. As Ann climbed the steps she would test each with a hand first, almost on all fours: it distributed her weight and let her detect loose boards before stepping on them. She was up to the top in no time at all without a creak or a pop to give her away. Ann stepped into the bedroom (immediately filed in her memory: lots of dingy whites and faded colors on aged quilts, a grandmother or the aging mother of adult children who lived at home; strong impressions of maternity, dust and routine use of enough rose water skin lotion to leave a little of the scent behind in her bed) and saw a young light-skinned guy in a pair of sweat pants, running shoes and a Philadelphia Eagles sweatshirt. He was going through the jewelry on the top of the dresser to separate out costume jewelry and sweep the valuable stuff into a pillowcase. Her first thought was that the Eagles' logo was far too reflective to work on a stealth suit.

  “Put down the jewelry, put your hands on your head and kneel.” Her voice was a confident al
to, forced lower than its natural range with a gruff aggression she had acquired from years of use. The guy looked at her, threw the flashlight at her – she dodged – and then he threw a small wooden rocking chair, sized for a child and holding a rag doll, through the thin, brittle glass of an old window before leaping out after it. Ann had the hair's-breadth slice of a second for which she was trained to decide yes or no on giving pursuit.

  She dove out after him.

  The window had shattered unevenly but the burglar had cleaned out most of the edges himself. He had survived the drop without apparent injury to his legs and was running across the back yard. Ann leapt far enough out the window to overshoot the debris on the ground, rolled on the side of her subordinate arm and came up in a crouch. The guy was trying to climb the fence to the next yard and doing a surprisingly quick job of it: he was over before Ann could catch up to him and she found herself slowed down by the surprising flexibility of the aging wood of the fence. It was almost spongy to the touch and could only barely support her weight; she was surprised it didn't disintegrate under the other guy but maybe he got luckier with which boards he grabbed. It occurred to her that she could just kick the fence down but that would be another cost to the homeowner. She got over the fence in time to see him swerve to the right and then the left to run around the side of the house. Ann was off and after him, running in slow, measured, easy strides, preemptively taking breaths timed for maximum oxygen and heart rate regulation. She wasn't at the absolute peak of fitness as she had been when she was deployed but she was as close as she could stay and still hold down a day job. She could easily run a couple of blocks without breaking a sweat or being noticeably out of breath.

  Around the side of the house Ann went, onto Fleetwood: a dead-end with no traffic. When Eagles went across the street his feet were pounding hard. He wasn't used to this kind of exertion. The running shoes were all talk. Ann was deer-fleet as she bounded after him and every now and then his head turned and he checked to see that, yes, he was still being chased by a shadow that wasn't ever supposed to be there in the first place. She didn't bother crying out to him to stop; he'd missed his first opportunity and that was the only one she'd give him.

  Directly across Fleetwood was a paint-chipped A-frame house that was up a couple of cement steps, elevated above the street. The sides of the house were dark but the living room was lighted and he stomped up the steps, across the yard and through the front door. Ann heard the door bang against the wall of the entryway and a woman’s scream before she followed him through the door in a long stride. An old woman was staring and her husband was going for the mantle; he wouldn't make it to the old rifle before both she and her quarry were gone. Hell, they could have walked through here and beaten him to it. Eagles and then Ann flew out the door at the back of the kitchen and around an empty and weather-beaten above ground pool she figured they'd gotten for the grandkids in the spring of some more optimistic year. Eagles pushed through a high hedge that was patchy with holes; she did the same.

  Another kitchen, another house of faded and aged people screaming in fear, just like the last one but in reverse. They shot, one after the other, down the front steps and into another street, across a line of pseudo-woods separating the back of a city park from the sidewalk. In the artificially open clearing, by the moonlight, she could see that he had dropped his sack of jewelry somewhere. That was no problem: he’d just saved her from having to get fingerprints on it when she caught him. They ran fast and free across close-cropped grass that had been mown to within a millimeter of its life as autumn bent closer to winter, before the frost came and dew got heavy and the groundcover stopped growing altogether. She could hear her target breathing hard, his lungs rattling deep in his chest. He was probably a smoker. This would be over soon.

  Eagles surprised her by vaulting the chain link fence around the large yard of a small house someone was using as a daycare. Plastic jungle gyms from a lousy discount store and a small herd of those toy cars a toddler can sit in and push around with their feet were scattered about the place. The guy tried hilariously to pick one up and lob it backwards but it was nowhere near Ann when it came down far short. All that turning of momentum backwards just slowed him down even more. Among the several topics she imagined he had failed in school was clearly physics. She was closing the gap between them and he only had seconds left. Finally he hit the other side of the yard, went over the fence at a run and into the open garage of a low brick ranch with Christmas lights already up. These were people who took their holiday celebration seriously: multicolored icicle lights along the front gutters and electric candles in every window. Ann heard more screaming. Time to shut this guy down.

  She ran in after him, past the power tools of a previous decade and a number of rather skillfully crafted birdhouses, into a laundry room and then a den where two kids were shouting their lungs out. There was an older woman brandishing a frying pan – a real cast iron frying pan, which Ann allowed herself to admire – and a big man with rough hands was blocking the burglar's exit down a hall towards whatever door or window he hoped to find. All of the people who lived here were making sounds but none of them was saying anything intelligible. The burglar was frozen in the chaos so Ann took her chance while she had it: one hand on his right bicep, the other on the back of his neck, she levered the burglar around and slammed his head against a wall paneled in fake pine boards. The guy's face broke through and he made some muffled cry before she yanked his right arm back and around. She heard something rip and snap; maybe his bone, maybe his shoulder, whatever, she was here to cause injuries not to diagnose them.

  Ann yanked him back out of the wall by that disabled arm, blood flecking the boards as she flexed his body against his will. She twisted him around and swept one foot up to kick him in the right kneecap. Something audibly snapped before he went down in a shrieking heap. Ann dropped to one knee by his right side, rolled him onto his stomach, yanked both wrists behind him and pinned them with her weight. She stuffed a throw pillow into his mouth to shut him up. It bore a machine-stitched message of incongruous good cheer.

  Everyone was still screaming so Ann looked from each to the next in slow, serious succession. Eye contact can either excite or calm civilians and she was using it to assert authority. She wanted them to know they could let go of their fear of being out of control in the sudden chaos. The man stared in silence and the woman continued to brandish that well-seasoned frying pan but they all fell silent after a few stunned seconds. Ann looked back down and studied the burglar long enough to make sure he wasn't trying to muster meth-strength or something. He had that slight mothball smell but she guessed it was from production rather than consumption. She let her eyes flick over again to the man of the house. They locked gazes for a long second. He turned, finally, to the woman: “Call 911, Dora.” He was a huge slab of beef: tall, with skin the color of toffee and what hair he had left turning gray. Dora was a little younger but not much; too young to be a grandmother, though. They must have been kids when they got together. They'd made a happy little life together. His birdhouses revealed a soul that could see the value in doing something well for another's enjoyment. Dora lowered the frying pan. She was wearing a pink housecoat with fuchsia roses sewn down the front like a priest’s vestment. She swept into the kitchen and Ann heard a phone pick up.

  There was absolutely no way Ann would be able to explain this to the police. There was just no way. This was everything a cop fears in a neighborhood watch. This was going to be way too Trayvon Martin for anybody’s tastes. Ann shook her head at the man, once to each side, with a hard look that communicated urgency. She heard Dora say, “Yes, I need the police. I'm at...” The guy hadn't been quick enough to say something. The street address was out. The police would come. Ann had broken almost as many laws as this burglar had. She had stopped him, though. He was a criminal; she wasn't; but she wasn’t sure the police would recognize the distinction. There would be an awful lot of questions.

 
Ann yanked an old lamp off a table, ripped the cord out of the wall socket and then pulled the other end free of the lamp’s base in one tug, her arms flexing. Her whole body sang out in joy for this chance to run and chase and fight again. Lifting weights and going jogging and taking long walks were not the same as action. They were less than methadone to a heroin addict, less than any other substitute she could think of for any other act. They were like hearing someone describe a porno. This chase had been the real thing.

  Ann tied the guy's wrist in a knot not even a boy scout could recognize or undo and yanked the pillow out of his mouth; no good stealing from these people in the course of preventing the theft from some others. Ann hefted the burglar over one shoulder, held him by his feet, stood up and tested her weight: she could move with the guy like this. She thought about his Eagles logo and wrenched to twist him around to one side, then over, so that the insignia was on the inside of the fold she had made of him over her shoulder. It wouldn’t be comfortable for him but it would be harder for him to fight and she didn’t much care.

  Even as the guy who lived there cried out for her to stop, Ann ran back out through the laundry room and the workshop garage, into the street and across it and back into the park. On her way through she grabbed a used shopping bag from Target and in the darkest corner of a copse of trees she turned it into a gag around the guy's mouth. He could still breathe but he couldn't vocalize. Then she set off to cut through dark neighborhoods and onto the American Tobacco Trail, a bike and jogging path that was technically closed at night. Once on it she turned towards downtown and the Durham Bulls Athletic Park.